it would not be long before she would drive herself again. Still, she had to admit she did not mind the extra attention, the cloak-and-dagger ride from the family villa to Palazzo Venezia. The police escort, the clandestine messages at each checkpoint, the changes from taxi to motorcycle sidecar and back to a taxi, exhilarated her. The furtive entry from via Astalli through the courtyard and up to the Cybo apartment in a private lift had an air of the cinematic about it and she did love the cinema. It was an exciting punctuation to what could otherwise be endless hours of boredom. Please let Ben be in a good humour, she thought. Today, she was not feeling up to dealing with his behaviour if he was out of sorts. Which was more and more often lately.
Entering the wide double doors of the Zodiac Room, she sagged beneath a wave of fatigue. She had not fully recovered from the last miscarriage. Hormones, her father said, hormones were the cause of the debilitating blood loss. Whatever hormones were. In the reflection in one of the many tall gilt mirrors, her stomach was completely flat. That was something. Ben hated her to be fat, but he did not like thin women either so she had better be careful. She cupped her breasts in her hands; they were still nicely full. To her left on the sideboard were three dressmaker’s boxes. She wandered over, lifted the lid of the top one, flicked the pale blue tissue paper aside, let the lid drop. Not even new frocks could hold her interest today. Perhaps she was coming down with something. She massaged her temples. She fingered the pearl rosary in the pocket of her skirt but did not feel like starting a rosary either … one decade perhaps … but even that seemed too long today. At the small side table, she stood on one leg and flipped through Ben’s copies of Plato and Socrates. The books were much-thumbed, the pages dog-eared and covered in Ben’s annotations. Socrates was in Greek so she could not read that and though the copy of Plato was in Italian, it may as well have been Greek – it gave her a headache. Ben was so clever.
Careful not to smudge her make-up, she put her fingers to her temples again and massaged them gently. Ben hated her to wear makeup. Dirtying your face, he called it. It was the same with perfume. He liked the hair of her armpits and between her thighs to smell just a little. Not too much. To smell natural, but Claretta had her wiles and her ways. You had to be careful to look as if it were all natural. Really, it took much longer to look natural. She clicked her tongue: tsk tsk.
Clara regarded her reflection again. Apart from the minor distortions of such old glass, she was happy with what she saw. No grey hair yet. That was a relief because when her mother was her age, nearly thirty, she already had fine filaments of silver in her black hair. That could look very elegant … but not yet. She was glad her face was oval – wasn’t that supposed to be the perfect shape? She wandered across the room to the high step at the windows giving onto the lush garden of the internal courtyard. Her world began and ended these days with this room and that view. Last summer and the secret trips to the seaside seemed a lifetime away. Outside, the light had changed. Autumn, already mornings were chilly, dark. The leaves were turning too. She shivered. Behind her, the door opened but the footsteps were not Ben’s. Quinto Navarra entered, carrying the tea tray. He smiled at her, inclining his head in a small bow.
‘Will he be joining me?’ There were two cups on the tray.
He shook his head. ‘Who knows? Today has not gone well.’ His face said he felt sad for her. He waited.
‘Would you like a cup then?’ she asked.
Her loneliness filled the room.
Quinto Navarra was used to standing in for his boss and it seemed to happen more and more often. He smiled at her, poured himself a cup of tea and sat on the long sofa opposite la signora. Tea. He hated tea but they both affected to like it and he was never offered coffee these days. Ever since the gastric ulcer, coffee had disappeared from the menu of Il Duce. Like so much else, the days of extra strong espresso were long past. The March on Rome had been fuelled by coffee as black as pitch. Now the Regime ran on camomile, he thought glumly. Quinto had habituated himself to it. It was the least of the things he had learned to get used to.
In twenty years, his boss had never once asked his opinion on politics but he sought it on everything else. The only other person as close to Il Duce was Clara. Until she came into his life, Mussolini had been a lonely man. He had never had a friend that Quinto knew of. He regarded the woman seated before him, thinking that nowadays being Mussolini’s lover was not all that much fun. She was very pale today. Getting very thin. So was the boss. This stupid dieting of his was killing them both. He had always been a picky eater but it was becoming obsessional. With every month, the boss’s dietary restrictions got harder and harder to understand. He must have lost twenty kilos. Every week he had a new complaint but if you said anything, you got your head bitten off. If anyone else mentioned the health of Il Duce, it was almost regarded as treason.
‘Tell me who he has seen today,’ said Clara.
She could not, he knew, abide silence. She was always on the lookout for information, about the people around Ben and especially about her competitors. Quinto leaned back in his chair and recounted the morning’s discussion about the progress of the secret shelter being built for the Duce, deep beneath Palazzo Venezia. Then he related the amusing story of a visitor who had been thrown out for wearing a beard – could there be anyone left in the country who did not know of the Duce’s aversion to beards? He moved on to the details of the gruelling meeting with the Foreign Minister; the Duce’s son-in-law, Count Ciano, had left the meeting an unhappy man. Ciano had lost faith in the war and was urging the Duce to find a way to bring it to a conclusion. He argued ever more openly with the Duce’s policies and was ever more critical of the Germans. The Count was becoming careless, thought Quinto. Nevertheless, the Duce had noted with satisfaction that Ciano’s diaries were being kept up to date. The diaries were their insurance against carrying the blame for Hitler’s excesses, though it was important the Germans never saw them, as Count Ciano was well known to be no great friend of theirs. The Red Cross notebooks, filled with Ciano’s cramped script, lived in a small safe in the Count’s office.
Quinto knew, however, that Clara wanted to know about the others – the women. Her jealousy was legendary – the shouting and weeping and scenes of recrimination regularly leaked out beneath the heavy doors and washed over Quinto and the rest of the entourage. Il Duce’s habit of fathering children by his mistresses meant many of them remained in his life. The list was a long one. Angela Curti Cucciati – the mother of his favourite daughter, Elena – was a permanent thorn in Clara’s side, and Quinto was relieved to be able to say with impunity that she had not visited today. In fact there had been no female visitors, no ‘fascist visitors’, recorded in the usual slot in the log of Palazzo Venezia today.
There had certainly been the full complement of fervid letters from crazed female admirers. Some of them were quite disgusting, but the boss loved it all and always read their letters aloud to his staff and to Clara. He fucked more than the odd one or two as well. Said it was good for his health. Sometimes as many as four in a day and he even boasted to her about it. La Signora Clara seemed to take it as his due. Quinto shook his head. Doesn’t seem natural to me, he thought.
The camomile finished, he rose. ‘I will take this away and bring a fresh one when he comes.’
She had not touched the delicate biscotti.
Clara glanced at the cards and could not be bothered with Patience. Her nails – she could paint her nails, but then, Ben might come early and they would not be dry. She rummaged in the bottom of her bag for her cloisonné pillbox and extracted one small pill. Just one would not hurt. Well, perhaps two. She threw her head back, swallowed the pills without water and stood an instant, as if awaiting their effect. Gently she lifted the gramophone needle
